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I had 3 landlords living in London and all were absolutely fine to deal with, zero issues from us and glowing references from them when moving.

I had 6, and all were pleasant enough people, but 3 of them evicted us with one month notice because they were 'selling up'. In all honesty, I think that's what they thought at the time, but only one month later, the places were up on rightmove for rent at a higher price. Meanwhile we had to shell out an extra few hundred quid each time, plus moving costs and all the stress that goes with it.

Someone had a place to live for a year at below market rate at a time when they needed it.

That's great, but at some point you have to ask whether this is a good way to structure society, not just relying on stories of one-off situations where lucky individuals got a deal. It probably wouldn't be difficult to do a carve out for these specific scenarios anyway.

All these ideas to make being a landlord more prohibitive just mean higher rents and less choice for those who want to rent.

Very few people actually want to rent, and this is borne out by many many surveys.

The need for rental property isn’t going to disappear overnight and the slack isn’t going to be taken up by councils who are broke.

Of course it isn't, and a best-case scenario is that this situation will take decades to fix. The slack can be taken up by many more people than just councils too, and even then, their funding models are changing to allow investment in social housing.

Bit confused by the top graph mainly because of the first column…

Just saying that landlords tend to have ‘only’ one or two homes, but that those landlords represent the vast majority of homes on the rental market, so it’s not just large institutional investors that are the problem!

Just a few that come to mind:
Further limiting grounds for possession, higher minimum service-length terms for landlords (but not tenants), controls on rent increases, rights of first refusal, moving council taxes and business rates onto landowners (proportional to land values), ending buy-to-let for existing dwellings, additional SDLT and land taxes on second/third/etc homes, cracking down on short-term lets, allowing councils to reinvest sales of social homes into new social builds.

And on the financial side, various reforms to the mortgage market to allow long-term fixed rates and various other arcane fixes to undo the effects of market liberalisation, and adding a remit to the BoE to also manage housing inflation.

I’d be in favour of multiple bank rates set by the BoE, with buy-to-let falling in a higher band, and governments able to tax back the difference from banks to reduce their incentive to prioritise lending to those who already have collateral.

Weirdly a lot of potential reforms would be low or even negative cost, they’d just require the political gumption to face up to landlords and financial organisations.

This is one of the easy ones (from the budget):

The government will reduce right-to-buy discounts, and local governments will retain the earnings from council housing sales to allow them to reinvest.

holy moly

this as a tax for fundraising purposes not just as a way to balance housing market issues.

Yeah that's my worry

I’d be interested to know the distribution stats for 1 property, 2, 3 etc

Can't remember exactly where these were from, but they should give you a rough indication:

I think with a formal rights system, rather than a landlord's favour, you'd probably dissuade people from purchasing a place with sitting tenants, so there's potential that it would reduce the price the landlord would be able to achieve.

I don't know enough about housing co-ops to know if they're feasible on individual flats

I can't see why not, it's not like landlords do much anyway, it would just be managed at cost in the interests of the tenants instead

Other countries seem to manage with a large rental sector

Other countries have much better tenant protections or rent controls, which is the thing sorely missing here. Personally I'd love to see rights of first refusal when a tenant's home is sold, where they could either purchase the place themselves or elect a housing co-op to run it instead.

Only if 100% mortgages come back. Renters need a deposit, which becomes harder when rents become higher.

We should hopefully see reduced purchase prices over time from a lower level of demand from landlords. Many renters are actually in a position to buy, and the number of first-time buyers has increased in the last year or two, so a switch of tenure does seem feasible if the conditions are right.

The limiting side of this is that when people do buy their first home, they tend to buy places with more rooms (e.g. rather than sharing with others), so marginally reducing the number of bedrooms available to rent. In any reasonable world that should be easily solved by building more dwellings, and shouldn't be any reason to allow landlords to continue pushing up values.

I used a Knog PWR Trail when commuting through pitch dark lanes in rural Essex and it was great (actually bought two of them, so I had a spare battery if it ever ran out). I'd thoroughly recommend.

Driving chat

The one I was on about was just direct through Greenwich council, not sure if others do the same: https://www.royalgreenwich.gov.uk/info/200268/street_cleaning_and_repairs/2143/sponsor_a_tree

I was kinda surprised it’s such a direct service to be honest, which is quite nice to see (aside from the £450, mind you)

Looks great, which specific Fidlock bits are these / how does it work?
The ones on the Restrap rando are sometimes a bit fiddly (these ones I think), and have unscrewed themselves a couple of times on rides for me, where the bag flew straight off the rack into the road after braking

ha, knew I was destined for this thread at some point

They'd not actually go through with it anyway, to be fair. As soon as a leaf touches the roof of a car (the horror!), they'll want to chop them all down

Totally, yeah

"Why can't everything just be more pleasant (from my parochial Conservative perspective)?"
"Oh, it was us, wasn't it?"

They sounds good.

I’ve sent a few questions to my local council about the feasibility of tree planting on the main high street near me (Trafalgar Road/Woolwich Road, in East Greenwich), since they do run a scheme across the borough.

They just keep ignoring me though.

Apparently you can sponsor a tree planting for £450/tree too, which is a bit spenny if you want the entire high street to be planted. Maybe a local campaign/whip round is in order…

I quite like that the position of the lever gives you some feedback, rather than the virtualised up or down decision of trigger shifters

That you need to move your fingers into position first doesn’t really matter that much, it only takes a moment, and it’s not like you’re shifting every second or anything

This sounds great:

a push to plant trees on every residential street "where this is remotely possible".

Shame the rest of it is unhinged

And a transition toward that would include something like a right of first refusal for employees of a company to buy it when it’s being sold:

And I think, potentially, if something like a Marcora law could be introduced centrally, and with support from local and regional government, that could encourage working people actually to have ownership of companies when they are sold. That kind of central government support for a more democratic economy could make a real difference.

the Marcora Law – this is the provision we see in Italy that would provide an opportunity for the workers within a within a firm to buy-out that firm if it were changing hands, or if it were in in danger of being closed down.

(From the first link, above)

Check out the Preston model, a kind of co-operative/mutual municipalism:
https://renewal.org.uk/the-road-to-municipal-socialism-the-present-and-future-of-the-preston-model/

that’s all now complemented by an expansion of economic democracy through new worker-owned firms, through cooperative housing projects, through new community land trusts; through insourcing; through work towards the establishment of a regional cooperative bank

Or further afield you've got the Mondragon Corporation, a network of co-operatives in the Basque region of Spain:
https://theconversation.com/the-mondragon-model-how-a-basque-cooperative-defied-spains-economic-crisis-10193

What arose in 1956 as a handful of workers in a disused factory, using hand tools and sheet metal to make oil-fired heating and cooking stoves is today a massive conglomerate of some 260 manufacturing, retail, financial, agricultural, civil engineering and support co-operatives and associated entities, with jobs for 83,800 workers, and annual sales in excess of $US20 billion.

There's some interesting work going on to create a green belt beneath the Sahara to stop the expansion of the desert southward. Not the greatest video, but okay to get the gist of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCli0gyNwL0

We are ill prepared for the coming demographic shifts

Totally agree. I think one of the more hopeful aspects of this, though, is that the development of poorer nations tends to be quicker and effectively skip past the more extractive industrial processes of older western nations.

The question then becomes more entwined with economic equality and political will. Who will be making decisions about resource usage as well as pushing for the technology and ecological practices required to reproduce society through more sustainable means?

Bah, beaten to it by Schick

but populations have grown the most in the past century in areas where there is comparatively little technology

the "use of machines" and related industrial "progress" is what has allowed the population to expand in the way that it has. i'm not sure that the two things can be decoupled.

If anything, we've seen a really strong decoupling in the wealthiest nations to the point where fertility rates have declined pretty rapidly. Maybe Malthus had a point in earlier industrial stages before the 20th century, but even then it was divisive to say the least. After rapid urbanisation and birth control, it seems like most people just don't really want to have more than two kids, which is what we'd need to exceed replacement rate. It doesn't really look like that's anything to do with resources aside from, maybe, land, which tends to have the effect of declining rather than increasing fertility rates.

That's all to say that, today, thankfully, we get to side step all of the nasty stuff that Malthusianism and obsession with population control started:

[Malthus'] scenario influenced policy makers to embrace social Darwinism and eugenics, resulting in draconian measures to restrict particular populations' family size, including forced sterilizations.

The belief that “those in power knew best what was good for the vulnerable and weak” led directly to legal actions based on questionable Malthusian science. For example, the English Poor Law implemented by Queen Elizabeth I in 1601 to provide food to the poor was severely curtailed by the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, based on Malthusian reasoning that helping the poor only encourages them to have more children and thereby exacerbate poverty. The British government had a similar Malthusian attitude during the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, Ridley notes, reasoning that famine, in the words of Assistant Secretary to the Treasury Charles Trevelyan, was an “effective mechanism for reducing surplus population.”

(From: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-malthus-is-still-wrong/)

I mean, this is still the same argument about benefits that many are having today, but we're still facing declining fertility rates:

based on Malthusian reasoning that helping the poor only encourages them to have more children and thereby exacerbate poverty